Food: AA Gill: Table talk

I’ve spent more time in pubs than in any other public building. More than in restaurants or cinemas, theatres or magistrates’ courts, libraries, museums or churches. More than in all of them put together. That’s an amazing testimony to the power of the pub — and a savage indictment of my social sophistication.

My abiding memory of pubs is not the Hogarthian jostle, the elbow-nudge and spittle-spray or the claggy dampness that implies every surface is the sickly skin of some giant comatose creature. It isn’t the bellowed bollocks, the charmless flirting or the desperate, choking camaraderie with geezers whose surnames I never knew, but whose girlfriends I’d shagged.

No, my abiding memory of pubs is the wide open emptiness, the motes drifting in the cue of sunlight above the pool table, the luke-bile gag